NYC

NYC; Soldiering On, Half-Century After Brown

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: April 13, 2004

FIFTY years have passed since the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Not to be unduly cynical, but you can see for yourself how integrated we have become by poking your head into almost any classroom in New York City. Whites, blacks, browns, yellows -- they are about as blended as a bottle of single-malt Scotch.

That reality, so sad you almost have to laugh, is hardly lost on Jack Greenberg, a professor at Columbia University's law school. At 79, he is among the last men standing from the band of lawyers who argued several desegregation cases that were combined in Brown v. Board.

''It's funny, but what's integrated more than anything else is small-town rural South,'' Professor Greenberg said the other day in his office in Morningside Heights. ''What's not integrated are the major metropolitan centers, where most black people live. It's a function of residential segregation, essentially city versus suburb.''

But Brown's impact went well beyond education, he said. It affected housing, employment, restaurants, you name it.

''Brown said you can't segregate schools because it affects a child's ability to learn,'' he said. ''O.K. Then immediately following that, they said you can't segregate buses in Montgomery. They said you can't segregate a golf course. They said you can't segregate a beach.

''This was the next thing after the abolition of slavery. Segregation was a way of keeping blacks as close to slavery as the states could. Now, segregation could no longer exist.'' Not lawfully, anyway.

The 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board is soon, May 17. Most who fought that battle are dead, including the lead lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who later became the Supreme Court's first black justice. Aside from Professor Greenberg, the only one left who argued those cases is Judge Robert L. Carter of Federal District Court in Manhattan.

The last few months have not quite been all Brown, all the time for Professor Greenberg, but they have come close. He has talked about the case and its consequences on college campuses and before bar associations from Utica, N.Y., to San Francisco. Columbia, whose law faculty he joined in 1984 after years as director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has had its own symposiums.

Also, Professor Greenberg recounts his experiences in ''Crusaders in the Courts,'' a book he wrote a decade ago for Basic Books, now being reissued by Twelve Tables Press. For extra measure, two of his law students, Michael Bogner and John Saroff, are seriously at work on making a movie of the book.

Any preference for the actor to play the young Jack Greenberg? The question brought a let's-get-real look. ''I've decided I'm going to pretend it's about somebody else,'' he said, ''simply because it's unavoidable they will make me out to be something that I'm really not.''

BACK to Brown, it was ''without a doubt,'' he said, the most important court decision of the last century. Nor did he doubt his side would win. ''You know, optimism and pessimism are a function of reality, but they're also a function of your temperament,'' he said. ''I'm a pretty optimistic sort of guy.''

Don't mistake that, however, for a Pollyannaish view of race in America.

On a journey through Eastern Europe last year, Professor Greenberg studied attempts to integrate Roma, or Gypsies, into the public schools. Those programs worked like a charm, he concluded, when compared with the ''complete hostility and antagonism'' that roiled this country in the years after Brown.

Hostility was far from confined to one race. He faced it himself in 1982 when he, a white man, was asked by a black colleague, Julius Chambers, to teach a course together at Harvard Law School. His years on the civil-rights frontlines did not immunize him from a boycott by black students, whose main objection was Professor Greenberg's color.

On the first day of classes, he had to pass angry protesters. ''Someone said, 'Aren't you scared?''' he recalled. ''I said, 'No, I was on the beach at Iwo Jima.'

''I wasn't scared. But I was really damned annoyed.''

Times change. A few weeks ago, he was at the University of Toledo in Ohio, talking about Brown v. Board, when a faculty member came up and said he wished to apologize. He had been among the Harvard protesters. Now he was offering three magic words that so many in this world seem incapable of uttering: